In Peak Oil, Matthew Schneider-Mayerson takes readers deep inside the world of “peakists,” showing how their hopes and fears about the postcarbon future led them to prepare for the social breakdown they foresee—all of which are fervently discussed and debated via websites, online forums, videos, and novels. By exploring the worldview of peakists, and the unexpected way that the fear of peak oil and climate change transformed many members of this left-leaning group into survivalists, Schneider-Mayerson builds a larger analysis of the rise of libertarianism, the role of oil in modern life, the political impact of digital technologies, the racial and gender dynamics of post-apocalyptic fantasies, and the social organization of environmental denial.
In Peak Oil, Matthew Schneider-Mayerson takes readers deep inside the world of “peakists,” showing how their hopes and fears about the postcarbon future led them to prepare for the social breakdown they foresee—all of which are fervently discussed and debated via websites, online forums, videos, and novels. By exploring the worldview of peakists, and the unexpected way that the fear of peak oil and climate change transformed many members of this left-leaning group into survivalists, Schneider-Mayerson builds a larger analysis of the rise of libertarianism, the role of oil in modern life, the political impact of digital technologies, the racial and gender dynamics of post-apocalyptic fantasies, and the social organization of environmental denial.
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Overview
In Peak Oil, Matthew Schneider-Mayerson takes readers deep inside the world of “peakists,” showing how their hopes and fears about the postcarbon future led them to prepare for the social breakdown they foresee—all of which are fervently discussed and debated via websites, online forums, videos, and novels. By exploring the worldview of peakists, and the unexpected way that the fear of peak oil and climate change transformed many members of this left-leaning group into survivalists, Schneider-Mayerson builds a larger analysis of the rise of libertarianism, the role of oil in modern life, the political impact of digital technologies, the racial and gender dynamics of post-apocalyptic fantasies, and the social organization of environmental denial.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780226285573 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 10/14/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 280 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Peak Oil
Apocalyptic Environmentalism and Libertarian Political Culture
By Matthew Schneider-Mayerson
The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2015 The University of ChicagoAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-28557-3
CHAPTER 1
The Peak Oil Ideology and Subculture
This chapter's epigraphs are taken from respondents 9566752, 9682014, and 9576993, respectively.
I look for ways to use less energy and go lighter upon the land. WHITE MALE, LIBERAL, FLORIDA, FIFTY-ONE TO FIFTY-FIVE
It has changed my entire being. I went from a futurist cornucopian to a doomer in about two years. I gave up my car and ride a bike everywhere now. I installed a little solar, and I take steps to try to prepare for the coming squeeze. WHITE MALE, MISSISSIPPI, THIRTY-SIX TO FORTY
Anyone who points out the ridiculousness of our current way of life and its dependence on a fundamentally unsustainable resource is laughed at as crazy or shunned as a "downer." White male, Democrat, Florida, thirty-one to thirty-five
As this chapter's epigraphs suggest, the theory of peak oil inspired intense conviction as well as action. Believers described their awareness of oil depletion and environmental crisis in terms that were strikingly similar to those used to describe a religious conversion. They recalled the exact moment it occurred, their emotional response, the dramatic change in thinking, and the reordering of their personal cosmology. Long-held normative assumptions about the natural environment, the nation, the future, and ethical conduct were questioned and often swept aside. Many believers found new occupations, purchased land, and severed ties with friends and family. In this chapter, I explore the ideology of peakism, a belief system that began with simple doubts about energy security and led many to a dramatic personal transformation. I use information culled from my surveys to illustrate the beliefs that peakists held in common and then examine the ways that this belief system was expressed in real-world actions and a rich virtual subculture by profiling the motivations, concerns, and contradictions of three representative peak oil believers and two influential authors and bloggers, the peak oil Jeremiah James Howard Kunstler and the Peak Shrink Kathy McMahon. I conclude by differentiating peakism from the dominant social paradigm held by most Americans, one characterized by an implicit expectation of social progress, unlimited economic growth, and technological solutions to future problems, and document some of the social consequences of adopting this radical ecological identity.
Peakism
Peakism is the ideology of peak oil believers. As the historian Eric Foner defined it, ideology is a "system of beliefs, values, fears, prejudices, reflexes and commitments — in sum, the social consciousness — of a social group." Belief in peak oil is much more than an isolated opinion about petroleum reserves; rather, it is an entire system of beliefs since it "poses another Answer for Everything competing for the roles against many hundred other Answers," as an Arizona man put it. Specifically, peakism is marked by many of the same characteristics of recognized ideologies, including internal coherence, intellectual abstractness, specificity, sophistication, dogmatism, and affective investment. While ideology is a contested term in contemporary scholarship, in this case it appropriately represents the degree to which peakists adopted a package of beliefs and expectations that set them apart from most Americans and the way that these beliefs were enacted in cultural practices. My use of ideology does not carry the pejorative connotation of false consciousness, but it does recognize that the adoption of a counterhegemonic ideology often "entails an aggressive alienation from the existing society."
As described in the introduction, peak oil refers to the maximum rate of global petroleum production, after which oil prices are expected to rise steeply. Peakists believe that this point is almost on us or has already been passed, while most geologists and oil industry insiders believe that a peak in conventional global petroleum production is years, if not decades, away. Befitting a "people of plenty," most Americans have a tacit (if unexamined) faith in the development of new technologies to provide energy for future generations, but peakists are pessimistic about the potential for other fossil fuels and renewable energy sources to replace petroleum, not only as fuel for transportation, but also in the production of plastics, pharmaceuticals, and the enormous array of petrochemicals our current way of life demands. They held fast to a set of practical doubts about the feasibility of an impending energy transition that constituted articles of faith so central to their ideology that they are worth explaining in some detail.
Natural gas is difficult to transport, subject to its own production limits, and environmentally destructive, and the United States lacks the infrastructure needed to replace gasoline with natural gas as the primary fuel for transportation — most oil pipelines are too porous for natural gas, for example. Coal is an inefficient energy source (compared to petroleum), and the health and environmental consequences of coal mining and combustion are increasingly considered intolerable. As the Fukushima disaster in Japan showed, nuclear meltdowns could render entire countries uninhabitable, and the question of safe nuclear waste disposal has never been answered. While renewables such as solar and wind power will be critical to energy production in a postpetroleum world, they were seen as not reliable or efficient enough to replace fossil fuels on a global scale. Even if a major national project of renewable energy development were to be implemented, peakists believed that it would be simply too little, too late. Resource wars over remaining petroleum (such as the Iraq War) will siphon funds and expertise that could go toward the development of alternative energy sources. As billions of people in the Global South (in countries such as India and Brazil) and less-developed countries (such as China) seek and achieve a first world, high-energy lifestyle — the average American currently uses over four times more energy per year than her Chinese counterpart — the global demand for a finite resource will only grow.
Despite its name, the peak oil ideology is more accurately described as peak everything, reflecting the limits-to-growth environmental paradigm that emerged in the United States in the late 1960s. Peakists were concerned with the threat of an ecological collapse of which petroleum is the principal symbol, and most considered peak oil and climate change to be interrelated crises. A young peakist from Nevada argued that energy depletion is not an isolated issue but "part of a larger pattern including climate change, overpopulation, degradation of our physical earth (deforestation, denuding of farming landscapes, etc.)," and a Virginia woman in her late forties agreed, claiming: "[Peak oil is] part of [a] larger environmental crisis. Other resources are peaking or declining as well (fertile topsoil, wild fish, pollution sinks)." A New Yorker identified the problem even more broadly: "how humans interact with the environment overall." Peak oil is, then, not so much an obsession with oil as a form of radical environmentalism that challenges the fundamental relationship between humans and the natural resources we depend on. Although the peak in peak oil is a reference to the standard graph of petroleum production (see fig. 2a), which approximates a bell curve, it is also a metaphor: whether a plateau or a cliff, a peak is the point after which an inexorable decline begins. The y-axis of the graph in figure 2 represents global oil production, but for many believers it could be replaced with something much broader and more subjective, such as the expectation of future material and social progress, societal complexity, or capitalism — or even collective quality of life, happiness, and peace.
For peakists, basic doubts about the future of energy production led to an ideological conversion and personal transformation. The moment that peakists learned about peak oil or "got it" was often revelatory — the gulf between their conception of the future before and the conception of the future after their awakening is so stark that this moment often cleft their lives in two. A Washingtonian said that his "future plans [were now] framed by a peak oil future," for example, and a Minnesotan in his late twenties said that peak oil "[would] influence all" his "future occupation and lifestyle choice[s]." For most others, the change had already become evident in their lives. A Hawaiian man in his late fifties said that a "complex of environmental issues," including peak oil and climate change, had "defined [his] adult and professional life," while a carpenter admitted: "All of life is now seen through the lens of a lower energy future, and that has affected all of my choices."
For these Americans, peak oil referred to a dramatic teleology in which energy scarcity would lead to the collapse of the late modern capitalist system. Pessimists, sometimes referred to as doomers, envisioned an apocalyptic series of events involving warfare over scarce resources, epidemics, famine, and billions of deaths that would leave survivors in a new dark age, while more hopeful adherents imagined a less violent transition into a post-peak world that is simpler, smaller, and more local. There were significant variations in the beliefs of the peakist community, but they were primarily disagreements over the degree and immediacy of the crisis. Some claimed that global oil production peaked between 2000 and 2005 (and is now on a plateau), while others predicted that it was a decade away. Early adherents portrayed the peak oil crisis as a discrete event that would unfold over a few months; others, citing books such as Joseph Tainter's The Collapse of Complex Societies (1988) and Jared Diamond's Collapse (2005), expected a decades-long decline. Some believed that the effects would not be felt for a few years, while others considered energy prices to be the root cause of the recent economic recession.
Nonetheless, my surveys show that peakists shared a set of beliefs that differentiated them from socioeconomically similar Americans in important ways. While most people who have seriously contemplated these issues (already a minority of Americans) tend to believe that future energy shortages will be solved by technological leaps and renewable energy sources, few peakists agree. On average, they viewed resource wars for petroleum, a halved or quartered global population, and an apocalyptic scenario, including mass epidemics and billions of deaths, as three times more likely than continued business as usual. Almost all expected a significant drop in quality of life for Americans. This ideology is almost the inverse of the expectation of social progress and unlimited economic growth that was still widespread in the prerecession United States, a contrast I return to at the end of this chapter.
Along with their ideology, most peakists' values and sense of self also underwent a sudden transformation. A Maryland man said, "I am more aware of how my personal lifestyle, as well as that of broader society, is dependent on fossil fuel, and how we will all be affected," while a Coloradan in his late forties was "living more for the moment" as opposed to "planning for the future." A woman in her sixties who saw peak oil and climate change as a "wake-up call that our civilization is going through a paradigm change" said that she had "learned to live with a whole lot less" and was "discovering that what's important to me is not driving an expensive car or living in a five-thousand-square-foot house or flying halfway around the world to go on vacation."
These psychological preparations for collapse and its aftermath were often emotionally painful, and most respondents admitted to short-lived feelings of depression and hopelessness immediately after becoming peak oil aware. However, a surprising number reported that their transformation had been psychologically beneficial. The Mississippi man quoted in one of this chapter's epigraphs claimed that his conversion brought on "the opposite of depression": "It gave me a framework [for my life], and people who believed the same." As a poster to the (now-defunct) Web site "Life After the Oil Crash" put it, many seemed to find "an amazing identity and purpose behind realizing" peak oil: "[It] has helped me take closer notice of life, and spend more time with family and friends, and appreciate the qualities of people and the world round me." A Nevada woman in her early fifties said that she was "living a much simpler life" and "approach[ing] life more a day at a time": "Spending much more time with loved ones and much less time focused on money and possessions. The changes have been good for me and my family." A New York man became "more aware of what [he has] and enjoy[s] 'simple' everyday things like reading a good book or taking a nice brisk walk." A number of believers even found in environmental apocalypticism the motivation to get in shape, such as the Nebraska man who "stays fit so [he] can rely on [his] body in tough times" and the Arkansas man who said: "I slowly begun [sic] to take more care of my physical health because it will be necessary for a day with less energy."
Peak Narratives: From Belief to Personal Action
Becoming peak oil aware constituted an existential shattering of many believers' meaning systems and caused most to change the way that they lived to reflect their revised goals, priorities, and life expectations. A Colorado man in his fifties said that his new "lifestyle is patterned after educating [himself] to how to live in a world with less oil," while a father in his thirties said that his awareness of oil depletion "has changed [his] entire being": "My wife and I are totally restructuring our future." A New Yorker who had helped found the MeetUp group Peak Oil NYC and organized peak oil conferences in 2005 and 2006 said: "[My] awareness of the impending reality of Peak Oil is both directly and indirectly the underlying driver for most of my activities." What actions did he and others take? Nearly three-quarters of American peakists had begun preparing food and supplies for the coming crisis, one in five had changed their occupation to reflect their new interests or require a less carbon-intensive commute, 53 percent drove less, and 32 percent purchased a more energy-efficient car. Only 11 percent had yet to act on their beliefs. As I will show, these actions were primarily personal, not political — for reasons that I explore in chapter 4, only 28 percent of respondents had engaged in formal or traditional political activities related to energy and the environment (campaigns, electoral politics, marches, etc.), and many of these had attended only one meeting of this or that organization. Before exploring the wide range of responses, let us look in closer detail at the peak oil narratives of three representative individuals.
A native Tennessean in his late fifties, "Robert" first heard about peak oil in 2001 and quickly "began reviewing other sources to confirm what [he] had read, as well as paying more attention to current news and analyses about energy topics." He saw oil depletion as a part of "a convergence of problems facing humanity," problems that included "climate change, imperialism, increasing income disparities and poverty, corporatist capitalism" and "infrastructure obsolescence and decay." He described himself as a socialist but was so "disgusted with both parties" that he no longer even voted. After the major peak oil Web sites (described in the next chapter) went online in 2004, he became an active member of the virtual community, checking in multiple times every day until 2010, when he decided to shift from gathering information to active preparation. His life was then organized around the question, "If I prepare now, how can I maintain a good quality of life for my family when energy becomes much more expensive, rationed, or intermittently unavailable?" Despite having never physically met another peak oil believer, he reduced his energy consumption by moving "closer to [his] job and family" as well as "trying to walk more" and "trying to eat less meat" — since (in the United States) meat is two to four times more energy intensive than vegetables and grains — and "trying to buy local food" that had not been shipped from thousands of miles away. He cut down on energy waste by "turning down [the] thermostat in [the] winter, up in [the] summer," and "insulating [his] home." To prepare for the collapse and its aftermath, he was "trying to grow, preserve and store food" as well as "buying bikes, sweaters, long underwear," items that would be in high demand. He also altered his landscape, by "planting trees," as well as his financial strategy, by "investing in precious metals and long-term oil futures." Beyond these tangible preparations, Robert was actively "maintaining awareness" about the timing of the expected crisis and "educating [his] family."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Peak Oil by Matthew Schneider-Mayerson. Copyright © 2015 The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
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Table of Contents
AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Oil and (Anti- )Politics
1 The Peak Oil Ideology and Subculture
2 Abundance, Scarcity, and Limits in the Age of Oil
3 Alone Together: The Libertarian Shift and the Network Effect
4 Apocalyptic Popular Culture and Political Quiescence
5 White Masculinity and Post- Apocalyptic Retrosexuality
Conclusion: Climate Change and the Big Picture
Appendix 1: Survey Data
Appendix 2: Questionnaire, July 2013
Notes
Bibliography
Index